


That Lingering Question

by Dessa



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-25 13:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18575422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dessa/pseuds/Dessa
Summary: Sabine asks Ezra that one lingering question that just won't go away.(Set during Season 1, sometime after Path of the Jedi, but before Call to Action)





	That Lingering Question

Sabine frowned as she looked at the project she was working on. She just couldn't concentrate. There was just one thing that had been bothering her, about their newest crewmember. She supposed it was finding out about his parents that had pushed it to the front again. Sighing and giving up on her art, she left her cabin, searching out the boy.

It wasn't hard to find him, it turned out. He was sitting at the Galley table, tinkering with something he'd picked up somewhere. Honestly, she didn't know where he kept getting these random pieces of stuff (other than the things he'd asked for when building that lightsaber of his), but he always seemed to have something he was tinkering with.

No doubt sensing her through the Force, Ezra looked up from what he was doing. "Hey, Sabine. What's up?"

Sabine shrugged. He'd come to trust them, sure, but she didn't know how her question would be taken. "Not much. Wondering what you were doing."

Now it was Ezra's turn to shrug. "Old habits. Take stuff that doesn't work, fix it so that it does, make a few credits." He looked back down at his work.

Sabine bit her lip. It was now or never. She slid into the booth next to him. "You mind if I ask you a question?"

Ezra paused slightly, then continued working. "Only if you don't mind if I don't answer," he said flatly.

"It's just that... I've been wondering..." she trailed off, unsure of how to phrase it without insulting the boy. She changed tactics. "What age do you usually start schooling on Lothal?"

Ezra stopped his work, and looked at her. "You want to know how someone who was on the streets for 7 years isn't as dumb as a brick, right?"

Now it was Sabine's turn to freeze up a little. "How did you--?"

"How did I know? Honestly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to ask. Age 5 or 6, by the way, depending on your birthday. I only had about a year and a half of formal schooling before my parents, you know..." He smiled at her. "I learned my basic alphabet and numbers, at least. Oh, and I did keep going to school afterwards. I mean, sure, my parents friends and other native Lothalians knew, but the Imperial idiots at school? They didn't catch on until it was Parent/Teacher conference time. And hey, I got one free meal a day, at least!

"But, yeah, it didn't cover all that much. By the time I had to leave, I at least had the basics of reading and arithmetic, if barely. And I did still have friends. They'd slip me food sometimes. And this one girl, Moreena, she'd show me some of her homework, at her family's farm, let me learn off of that. But most of it? I learned it on the streets."

"On the streets? But from--?"

"I'm getting to that. First, there was this Xexto, Ferpil Wallaway. Ostensibly, he was a pawn shop owner. But do you think what he had for sale was really pawned? Nah, he was a pickpocket, and he taught me everything I know. Well, most of it, at least. Worked with him a lot. I'd bring him stuff, he'd pay me for it, we had a good deal going. Heck, I'd probably have considered him a friend, if I had've thought about it."

"Had've?"

"Yeah... he got killed by the Imps, not long before I met you guys. But that's a different story. Anyway, Ferpil taught me to pick pocket, and how to fix some stuff so it was in a condition he'd buy it from me in. Then there was Slyyth." Ezra shuddered at the thought of him. "Slyyth was a Ruurian. You ever see one of those?"

Sabine shook her head. "Heard of them, but not seen."

"Well, you're not missing much. Slyyth was a fence. A fence is--"

"Yes, I know what a fence is."

"Okay, just making sure!" Ezra grinned at her. "Anyway, Slyyth would use a bunch of us loth-rats to run various jobs for him. For the littlest, it was usually deliveries. Me, he usually recruited me for snatch-and-grabs. Of course, he also thought I didn't know what I was doing... man, was he wrong. Anyway, all the kids he used, he always made sure they knew their numbers and letters. After all, what good is a kid who doesn't know if he's getting cheated, when it's your money on the line? And he taught us the basics of a few languages, too, at least enough so that we could understand his targets.

"So, yeah, between Slyyth and Ferpil, and what I learned from Moreena, I managed not to be incredibly dumb. I mean, I managed to fit in at the Academy, didn't I?"

"Yeah, you did good, kid," Sabine admitted.

"See? Anything else you need, or can I get back to this?"

"That was all. It had just been bugging me a bit." Sabine got up, resisting the urge to ruffle his hair. The moment she was off the seat, Ezra waved at her offhandedly, and was back to his tinkering. She showed herself out of the galley, and went back to her art.

**Author's Note:**

> So, there's a lot of fics where Ezra knows a ton about languages, electronics, etc. There's also a lot of fics where Ezra can't read or figure or anything.
> 
> Obviously, Ezra's not "dumb as bricks." And in the show, he's never shown to have a particularly hard time with anything needed that would lead one to believe that he's illiterate. So I got myself a copy of Rebel Journal by Ezra Bridger, and read Ezra's Gamble, to get a little of his backstory, and decided to write this to maybe give some explanation of where he learned stuff.
> 
> For Slyyth teaching him and the other kids reading, math, and language, that bit's adapted from Mercedes Lackey's Take a Thief, from the Valdemar series (from which, I will admit, Skif is a heavy influence on my views of Ezra). It tells the character Skif's backstory, who was an orphan thief taken in with a bunch of other kids by a blind fence, who taught them what they needed to know to work for him. Once I'd learned that Slyyth was a fence, I figured that he most likely would have had to teach the kids the same way as Bazie did, although Bazie actually cared for the kids.
> 
> Initially, before writing this, I'd intended for Ezra to have known Slyyth before Ferpil, but the Rebels wikia says that Ezra already knew how to pick-pocket when Slyyth offered to teach him, so he had to have known Ferpil first. (What I know of Slyyth comes from the wikia and Rebel Journal, since I haven't read the additional scenes in The Rebellion Begins that have him in them).
> 
> Moreena and Ferpil are both from Ezra's Gamble, though the stuff about Moreena teaching him from her homework is all mine. Judging from their interaction in Ezra's Gamble, I figured that she must've helped him out a bit, and this made the most sense to me and for my narrative.
> 
>  
> 
> Now, I'm going to go and read the two Thrawn books, because the description of the third one indicates that it takes place during Season 4, and may have info for afterwards...


End file.
